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I have recently come to the conclusion that too many food truck owners do not have accurate recipes costs for their food truck menus. Recipe costs are the foundation of strategic business functions for a food truck such as menu engineering profit bench marking.

Unfortunately, food truck recipes aren’t typically written to determine accurate costs. They are generally written in standard cookbook terminology; instead they need to be viewed in manufacturing terms. Thinking about your food truck operation as a manufacturer is not common in the industry…although it should be.

Once this paradigm changes; food trucks will start to see improved profits and greater efficiency within their kitchen.

Use these two steps to determine accurate food truck recipe costs:

Step 1: Think Like A Manufacturer

The first concept is to understand what it means to treat your recipes like a manufacturer. The basic rule to follow is that anytime a product or ingredient changes form, no matter how simple it may seem, the costs involved in the change should be accounted for.

As an example, take fresh basil. When purchasing fresh basil from a local supplier, it often comes packaged with the basil is still on their stems. In order to make the basil usable, all the basil leaves need to be picked off. Although this is a very simple task, you need to account for the loss or the final weight of the leaves. If you paid $8.00 for a pound of basil and did not account for the loss of stem weight, you would have used $0.50 an ounce on our recipes…incorrectly.

Not everything has 100% yield. So in the example, we’ll say only 11 ounces were usable. This will result with a new cost of $0.73 per ounce. This is the way to accurately cost your ingredients.

Step 2: Convert Into Proper Weights And Measures

In addition to accounting for proper yields, the second piece of recipe costing is take your recipes and convert them into proper weights and measures.

For example, many recipes will call out for a tablespoon or teaspoon of an ingredient. Utilizing utensils ensures portion control and proper execution. However, for recipe costs, you need to account for the actual weights.

Just as accounting for the proper ingredient yields is important, it is just as important to account for the proper weights and measures to determine your food truck recipe costs for each ingredient as well.

With the growing level of competition in the mobile food industry, it makes absolutely no sense to make uneducated decisions. When dealing with your menu items, you need to understand the numbers to confirm that the addition or the removal of an item is the right direction to go.

While it might take some initial work and investment of time it is energy and money well spent in the long run. It will assist in improving the profitability of your food truck operation.

Do you currently look at your food truck recipe costs like a manufacturer? How long did it take to make this change? We’d love to hear your story. Feel free to share them in the comment section below, Tweet us or share them on our Facebook page.

TOMS RIVE, NJ – Carlos Serrano, the Empanada Guy, a wildly popular food truck vendor in Monmouth County criticized the Toms River Council over the township’s interpretation of a law he feels is dated and no longer should be on the books.

Serrano wanted to expand his popular latin based food cuisine to Toms River but was told he couldn’t operate in the same way he does in other towns.

That’s because of a law put on the books in 1973 which he feels is as irrelevant today as the 8-track-cassette which was also wildly popular that year.

“I wanted to apply for a permanent location for one of my food trucks in Toms River,” Serrano said. “The ordinance is from 45 years ago.”

That ordinance requires food trucks such as ice cream trucks and “roach coaches” to relocate every thirty minutes. Today’s modernized food trucks are not built the same as those vehicles were built in the early 1970’s.

Serrano said the ordinance was created at a time when technologies in automotive manufacturing, design and environmental standards were different than they are now.

“These trucks are state of the art, full-blown restaurants on wheels,” Serrano said. “They’re not cheap, but they’re very presentable and produce enough food to serve thousands of people.”

The antique ordinance on the books in Toms River does allow for a food truck vendor to park a truck on privately owned land, but dictates that an operator must move their truck every thirty minutes, regardless of who owns that land.

“You cannot setup a modern food truck in that period of time, we don’t work like ice cream trucks, we’re in a different time,” he said.

Food truck marketing has become second nature for the most successful food truck owners. For the less successful, it’s become a bit more difficult.

To help those of you struggling, we’ve compiled a list of the top four food truck marketing principles for you to use to get a better understanding and grasp of the marketing needed for your food truck business.

4 Key Principles Of Food Truck Marketing

Food Truck Marketing Has To Pay For Itself

The idea of a marketing budget for your food truck needs to be forgotten. Most food trucks define it as a percentage of their sales. [insert irritating buzzer sound] WRONG!

If you have a reliable way of investing $10 and getting back $20, how many of these ten dollar bills would you invest? (Hint: As many as you can get a hold of)

Then why would you cap your food truck’s marketing budget at an arbitrary number? The simple reason most do is that vendors typically aren’t sure if a ten dollar bill invested in your food truck marketing can reliably return $20 or any money at all.

If you happen to fall into this camp, you need to change the way you approach food truck marketing. There is always a way to measure and to know how much money each marketing campaign is generating for your mobile food business.

The World Doesn’t Need Another Food Truck

I have started hearing this in some of the large food truck communities. Usually from people looking to maintain their market share in those communities. It is up to every vendor to prove this statement wrong.

To do this, ask yourself these questions:

What makes your food truck unique?

Why should a customer come track down your food truck all the other options consumers have in your market?

If you can’t answer these questions unfortunately, the world can do without YOUR food truck.

Food Truckin’ Isn’t Easy

Yes the mobile food industry is a tough one to master, however it can be simple if you follow the right formula. Have you created an operations manual for your food truck? If not, why not? If you do, how often do you and your staff refer to it?

For how long can you afford not to be IN your food truck? Is that one shift? One day? One week? How about a month?

If your food truck depends on you being there for every shift, or every catering event, you don’t have a food truck business. What you have is a food truck job.

Build Customer Relationships

You may be in love with the equipment you installed in your food truck kitchen, or with the truck itself. Or maybe you love your recipe book and the beautiful menu board your graphics designer created for you.

This is all good. However, all that has very little to do with the real value of your business.

What you need to be in love with is your customers. You also need to become compulsive about maintaining an up-to-date list with all their contact information as well as birthdays and other important dates in their lives.

Although the industry is less than a decade old, the food truck industry is always changing. One aspect in that will never change is the importance of relationship food truck marketing.

Do you have any additional tips for vendors taking control of their food truck marketing? If so, we’d love to hear your thoughts. You can share them in the comment section below, Tweet us or share them on our Facebook page.

HONG KONG, CHINA - Members of the catering industry have expressed an interest in operating food trucks, as debate continues on where these vehicles should park and which department should investigate the idea.

Simon Wong Ka-wo, president of the Federation of Restaurants and Related Trades and also chairman of food and beverage firm Kampery Group, said he is interested in operating such a truck.

“Using a mobile truck, we tried to promote our Hong Kong-style milk tea in July and August. It had facilities to make tea,” he said.

He added free milk tea was served after a license was obtained from the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department.

Financial Secretary John Tsang Chun-wah announced in Wednesday’s budget that the government will investigate the concept of rolling out food trucks to sell food on the streets.Wong believes that food trucks will suit Hong Kong, which is famous for local and international cuisines.

Wong estimated that operators would have to invest more than HK$500,000 in a food truck which is lower than opening a restaurant.

He said these type of trucks were not meant for hawkers but for those who were financially capable. He hoped there would be more clarity with the catering industry on suitable locations for the trucks to operate.

Restaurateur Yenn Wong Pui- yain, who has opened Michelin- starred restaurants, such as Dudell’s and Aberdeen Street Social, said she was encouraged by the promotion of food trucks.

Ramone Dickerson and Corey Simmons are back on the airwaves in “2 Fat 2 Fly” this Saturday, February 28 on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) at 10pm/9c.

This 8 episode series takes a look at how these two best friends operate their truck, the “Fonz,” and seek out business expansion opportunities. Their hometown of Columbia, South Carolina has faithfully supported them, but they try to answer the question: “Is there more?”

Mobile Cuisine sat down with Ramone and Corey last week to get “the fat” (instead of “the skinny”) on their foibles throughout the series. Overall, they were pretty tight-lipped on the specific happenings, but they’ve learned whole lot more about food truck operations and themselves. Corey comments, “When we started, we were like teenagers. We took our licks and bumps starting out, but like a teenager you quickly get up and keep moving forward. Now we feel more like adults in business.”

What we will see are real friends/business owners face the hurdles and questions of business expansion. They’ve been at the edge of a precipice of business growth for a while now. How do they take that leap? Which direction do they jump? How do they do it while protecting their delicious stuffed wings?

Stay tuned to find out. “2 Fat 2 Fly” will air on Saturday nights on OWN at 10pm/9c. We’ll summarize each show after it airs and share more of our conversation throughout the season.

We want to see Ramone and Corey grow their un-clucking believable stuffed chicken wing business… There will be tons of laughter and a look into their real lives along the way.

Mobile Cuisine is the complete online resource destination for the mobile food industry.